The only reason I wasn’t already dead seemed to be curiosity.
Sweetie Belle, the Banshee, must have realized that Gilda was a distraction. I saw her eyes focus on the dagger clenched between my teeth, but she didn’t seem to grasp what it was. She couldn’t feel the dark radiate off the blade like I could. It was like a twisted sort of cold that radiated through my jaw and into my very bones. Were I not in direct sunlight, fog-stricken though it might have been, it was entirely possible that the dark within would have coalesced into mist, and slithered from the tip of the cursed knife.
Who was she, I wondered? She was so much larger than when I had seen her last. She looked so much like Rarity, and, for a moment, I wondered if perhaps they were related. That she might have been Rarity’s daughter was my first thought; she looked extremely similar to the mare made of bone dust. But Rarity had spoken longingly of a sister...I had no way to know their relative ages, before or after the sun had stopped, and ponies had become ageless.
No matter their true relation, Rarity would be proud of her, I felt. It was fitting that her highest acolyte would ascend, just as Rarity herself had, when she became the Gravelord.
Sweetie Belle still had that air about her—she stood like the high priestess of a cult, with her own spectral acolytes around her, snarling and snapping and baying like dogs. Only her spread wings kept them back, kept them from tearing into me with teeth and blade and fog. And even that was barely enough; one ghostly mare in particular seemed particularly mad, with her own knife clenched in her teeth, just like my own.
If she attacked—if they all attacked—what options did I have? Could I outrun them all? Could I fight? I had no idea whether this knife would even actually work, or if all it did was make my fur stand on edge. Would it wound them, make them bleed ghostly blood? Would it even affect them, or would it only rend the flesh of the living?
This was a stupid plan. I knew now why Ocellus hadn’t gone to get this knife for herself now—it would have been an unacceptable risk for her alone, to expose herself so thoroughly. She would have been caught out in the light like a cockroach, and I doubted that either of us could have outrun the ghosts. But I was expendable; so she sent me to at least try.
I didn’t want to die here.
That twitchy mare leapt at me, and I had no time to react. She may have been dead, or mist, but she still moved like a living equine. I jerked to the side to dodge the tip of her own ghastly knife, and the tip of my own blade met her neck.
There was no impact, and barely any resistance as the blade of the dark knife slid through her ghostly form. It was like cutting through fog, or slush, more than striking a living thing. But where the blade stabbed into the ghost, it left an ugly black smear, and the attacking spirit stumbled right through me as she clutched at her throat. I turned, as I shivered from the familiar, chilling sensation.
She was unimaginably more wounded from our brief contact. The black smear from the wound that I’d inflicted had not sealed or healed in any way; in fact, it looked as though it was spreading wider, along her neck, threatening to rip her head from her body. She scraped at her face with her hooves, mouth agape in horror and confusion, as she tried to keep her ghostly form together, in one piece, but the wound seemed to have sundered her very soul. Her own knife fell from her lips, and dissolved into mist before it touched the street.
The dark smear spread, writhing, as it crawled across her ethereal fur. Her limbs seemed to stiffen and tremble, all at the same time, and her frozen body spasmed and shuddered and vibrated faster than any physical pony could. Her body became a blur, all except for her face. That was horrifically still, as the rest of her body was overtaken by yawning dark, save for her eyes.
Her eyes turned towards me, and the other ghosts behind me. The Banshee, at the head of their formation. As the crawling, spider-leg tendrils of dark ripped at her ghostly fur and crawled up her dissolving head towards those eyes, they locked back onto me, and her mouth opened.
A bone-chilling scream shook the air and mist and stones all around me, as the ghost of the mare was ripped from her liminal state, and utterly annihilated. Anguish, fear, and pain all washed over me in a wave as the dark took her, and she was suddenly torn away as if pulled down a drain. The body of the spirit was reduced to black blood, which spiraled into a central point, a single condensed stream of dark. That stream leapt towards me, and I flinched away, but it found the blade of the ancient knife I held in my teeth regardless.
I wanted to drop it, as the consumed spirit of the mare was stretched impossibly thin, and pulled screaming into the circular hole in the center of the wide blade. Not a hoof-length from my eyes, I saw the strand of dark, thinner than the width of a lock of hair, get pulled into the absolute nothing the blade had been built to contain.
I’d nearly cut myself on this dagger when I pulled it from the shelf. If this cursed blade had split my own skin, would I have suffered the same fate? And what fate exactly had I just condemned that ghostly mare to?
I wanted to stumble away, as the last trickles of dark filtered into the cursed knife. Instead, I turned, and realized my hooves were shaking as I looked over the crowd of ghosts. I’d just murdered one of their number, in one of the most uniquely horrific ways I could have ever imagined. They, who perhaps had not known defeat since they surrendered their physical form. They would surely rally in moments, and it wouldn’t matter how many I sliced and stabbed with this accursed knife, I would fall eventually.
But for the moment, the Banshee—Sweetie Belle—looked startled. Death for her, for her kind, was suddenly a reality once more. And though the knowledge that the blade existed made me want to puke, and the fact that I held it in my teeth—and had just sundered a spirit from reality using it—made me want to turn the dagger on my own throat...it gave me the upper hoof, for only a moment.
It wasn’t a moment I could afford to waste. I’d fight my way out like a cornered animal, if I had to do that to escape Baltimare.
“Back!” I snarled through my clenched teeth, through the dagger held between them. I brandished the cursed blade at them, feinted a lunge, and the ghosts scattered in terror. Only the Banshee remained, and even she stepped back, startled.
Maybe I could have used that moment; maybe I could have leapt at her then, in that moment, and slain the Banshee where she stood. But I had my opening, and so instead I turned to my right, and bolted down the street. I ran, with the knife in my teeth and a city of fog between me and the others. Soon, a legion of ghosts would be on my heels, and I needed to put as much distance between us as I could before they caught up.
* * *
The singing started again, only moments after I broke into a gallop, but the ghosts that gave chase didn’t actually catch up to me until I was almost back to the library. Until then, it was only the singing, and this song was not slow and mournful as it had been before. This time, the song was angry, aggressive, and I knew I was being hunted.
It was two pegasi that reached me first, and I only knew they were coming because of an errant glance backwards. Even then, at a dead gallop through the fog, I only just barely saw them. The fact that I was able to dodge at all was sheer luck.
One of them still caught my leg, and I stumbled as they used their ethereal grip to tackle me, while the other swept past, too fast to halt their own momentum. Meanwhile, I couldn’t afford to stop; I stabbed wildly with the cursed knife until the grip on my hindleg went slack, and I heard that ear-shattering scream as another of the ghosts was ripped asunder by the dark.
The other stayed back after that point, afraid to close in for the kill by himself. But one ghost I could handle, so long as I kept an eye on him. I resumed my gallop, but between a bruised leg from the fall and the occasional glance back, I was slow enough that the rest of the ghosts caught up soon. By the time I was a block from the library, I had three earth ponies galloping behind me, two pegasi above, and a unicorn that kept teleporting ahead of me. He was particularly hard to dodge, because he seemed to teleport by dissolving into fog, which then swirled past me to coalesce on street corners.
I could outpace the others, but his knife slashed at my armor and stabbed through the leather joints as if they were barely there. He had to die, or else he’d cut me down for the others to tackle. The next time he began to coalesce in front of me, I leapt right for him, and the knife was already in his chest when it formed.
The unicorn stallion was split in half by the mere presence of the knife, and both halves exploded into swirling dark as he howled. Trails of needle-thin abyss wove through the air around me as I kept galloping—I hadn't even slowed down for the strike.
And then I was flying. I thought I was dead for a moment, or about to die, but the sensation of claws around the armor of my barrel gave me pause. As we shakily rose over the rooftops, towards the tall, safe haven of the Baltimare Library, I looked up at GIlda, who asked, “What in actual ruttin’ Tartarus was that noise, Hollow? It sounded like the sky screaming—I’ve never heard anything as horrific as that in my life!”
“L-later! Later!” I yelped around the knife in my teeth, as the two pegasi easily caught up to Gilda in the air. One clamped her teeth around Gilda’s leonine tail, and the other started stabbing wildly at Gilda’s back—he was trying to ground her, trying to stab at the base of her wings!
Gilda spun and dove, which flicked the pegasus off her tail, but now I was face-to-face with the pegasus stallion that had been at her back. I couldn’t grab at my knife while we were moving—I was too afraid that if I unclenched my teeth, I’d drop it in the street, and then we’d never get it back. Instead, I slapped my hooves together, and grabbed for my fire, then forced it to flare as brightly as I could.
A wave of heat rolled over me, as my hooves ignited, with the flames of combustion burning brightly in both. It wasn’t more than a flash of fire, but it made the ghost jump, and blinded us both, and it bought us just a few more seconds.
“Hah, nice, Holly! You scorched that dweeb’s eyebrows real good!” Gilda crowed happily as we swooped low, but I’d have to take her word for it; I was seeing spots still. A moment later, Gilda leveled out, and I was falling—
My back slammed into the rooftop of the library, and sparks exploded all around me as my metal armor left a nasty dent in the corrugated copper. I bounced, and it was only after I came down from that teeth-rattling bounce that all of my momentum had bled off, and I was left lying on the sloped roof, with black blood drooling from my loose jaw.
Gilda landed nearby, slightly more gently, but her focus was on the ghosts that swarmed around the building, trying to bash their way in through the wards once more. In the short time between dropping me and now, she’d already drawn her bow, and though she couldn’t actually use it to harm the ghosts, drawing her aim on them seemed to bring her a small comfort.
I’d lost the knife on impact. I knew I needed to get up and find it, more importantly than anything else, but the broken pain sending sharp stabs of agony up my leg to my shoulder told me that, no, I should probably not get up quite yet. It felt broken, at least; it was still connected, because I could feel too many different stabbing pains down to my hoof, but I think i would have preferred if I had lost it in this case. My jaw, too; it hung loosely, and when I shifted, it didn’t even try to close. I tried not to think about that.
At that moment, I kind of missed my old quilted armor. My metal armor felt like it had only acted as the hammer to the anvil that was the roof, and I was the soft steel in between the two. My belly roiled, but I didn’t even have the energy to hack up another lump of pale fish meat, no matter how my guts had been compressed. In fact, I strongly suspected they were still being compressed—I’d left a pair of dents in the roof, and it would be very strange indeed if my armor was not just as dented from the blows.
After a few moments, Gilda calmed enough to look back down at me, and a flicker of regret passed over her face. “Damn. Sorry, you came down heavy for a pegasus. Can you move?”
“Eeeeengh…” There had been words in that, or at least, there was supposed to be. I took a wet, ragged breath, and tried again. “B-ba...aa...ag…”
To her credit, Gilda didn’t ask any questions. She looped her bow back over her shoulder, then moved to my side. Her claws unhooked the bag from my belt, then she paused as she looked inside. “Uh, woah, okay. That’s a trip…” A moment later, she’d set it down in front of my face, and when I struggled to shift myself, she grabbed my unbroken foreleg for me. Fresh pain raked across my body as my broken bones ground against each other under most of my body weight, but the cool interior of the bag felt nice as Gilda jammed my hoof inside for me.
Healing. Warmth. Fire. My thoughts were scattered and disorganized. Everything hurt. But I managed to recall that little green glass bottle, and I felt a smooth, dusty surface press against my hoof. I grasped it tightly, and groaned, which Gilda took as indication that my hoof should be withdrawn.
The glass squeaked against the metal roof as I dragged the bottle out of the bag, and Gilda actually jumped in surprise when the warmth of the bottle washed over us both. Her eyes locked onto my bottle of healing instantly, and she eyed it warily as my hoof went limp. Thank the wind I'd landed on a less-sloped section of the roof, so it didn't roll far.
"What is this? Some kind of zebra potion? How did you—" Gilda ruffled her feathers. "—Agh, time for that later. Hopefully this fixes your dumb undead rump." She uncorked the bottle and upended the contents across my body. Mostly on my face, but she sloshed a decent amount of the liquid sunlight within across my back and leg as well.
There was a horrendous shifting feeling of suction from my jaw, and I felt my teeth move under my tongue. Then it suddenly snapped back into place, and left only a dull ache as the warmth spread through my body. I took a sharp breath as my broken bones boiled under my flesh. I wasn't sure, but felt as though they were melting, then reforming as they should have been, like a broken sword melted back into steel and recast whole once more.
I let out another sharp intake of breath, and needles lanced through my barrel. My armor was too tight, and my body didn't fit right inside it now that I was being un-crushed. I could barely breathe, and I had a horrible pang of deja vu as I groaned at Gilda, "St-top...save…"
"Yeah, no, I'm not leaving you up here on the roof to hollow out. Noble, but that sentiment gets you killed."
"Not…" I croaked, as Gilda sloshed more liquid sunlight across me. "W-waste...save...p-potion..."
That made her pause for a moment, and she considered the remaining contents inside the bottle. "Can you walk?"
I tried to gather my boiling leg underneath myself, to roll myself over so that I could stand. There was a wet snap, and it collapsed under me. My face met the verdigris-stained roof with another clang, and Gilda snorted through her beak. "That's what I thought. Hold still, let...whatever this stuff is...do what it needs to."
Gilda grabbed the edge of my breastplate, and used that to flip my over onto my back, which sent a fresh wave of hot agony rolling through me, as my broken hoof flopped limply against the metal. Then she dumped the rest of the liquid sunlight over me, until there was nothing left but drops inside the bottle. She nearly tossed it away, since to her, it was just a mundane glass bottle, but I yelped and struggled, which made her hesitate long enough that I could explain. “Don’t! The b-bottle...it’s imp-important.”
Gilda glanced at it in her claw, then shrugged, and carefully set it down beside my limp body. “Alright. How do you feel?”
White-hot agony continued to stab through my broken foreleg as the fire mended it for a second time. My chest was still painfully compressed, and my jaw felt uncomfortably loose. My collarbone seemed to be getting reforged as well, and I tried not to move around too much in case that caused it to heal wrong. “Hurt...hurt all..all over.”
Gilda winced, and looked away, at the ghostly pegasi that, even now, were circling the wards of the library in search of a gap. “I’m sorry I...that the landing was so rough. I figured you’d spread your wings, or land lightly, or...something. You’re wearing really heavy armor for a pegasus.”
“S’okay…” I groaned, as my collarbone began to cool. That was quick; maybe it’d been nothing more than cracks. “Knife...W-where…?”
Gilda glanced around for a moment, then flapped her wings to hop across the roof. A moment later, she returned, holding the crystal dagger at leg-length, like it was going to try and bite her. “Okay, wow, this thing is actually cursed as all Tartarus. Take it, I don’t wanna be touching it.”
“Wr-wrap it, f-first...blade can’t...can’t touch the f-flesh.” I didn’t know that for sure. It was possible the blade itself was harmless, aside from the usual danger inherent to being a knife. But after seeing what it had done to those ghosts, I didn’t want to run the risk.
Gilda’s face tightened around her break. “Great. And it didn’t come with a sheathe, huh? Alright, I can improv something. Stay there.” While I healed, Gilda drew her own knife from her belt, and compared it to the cursed knife. After a moment, she’d decided it would fit, albeit loosely, and she slid her own blood-stained knife into a loop of leather along her hindleg. It didn’t look comfortable, but it kept it handy without having to worry about stabbing herself. She’d end up shaving the fur off her leg if she moved around too much, though.
The cursed knife went into the now-empty sheathe, and she used a spare loop of twine from her pack to tie it into place, so it didn’t rattle around loosely, or even fall out. We wouldn’t be able to draw it without untying the grip, but that was fine. I could tell that we needed to be very careful about when we used that knife, and keeping it safe until then seemed more important for our own protection. She also picked up my bottomless bag, and the empty bottle of sunlight, which she slid back inside. Though she spent a moment after that staring inside the bag, like she was trying to figure out where it had gone.
By the time she was finished with all that, the burning pain in my leg had dulled to an uncomfortable pins-and-needles feeling, and I struggled to stand once again. Gilda grabbed me around the barrel and helped haul me to my hooves, but as soon as I was standing, she started to tug at the straps that held my armor around my barrel. After a minute of finagling, I sucked in a lungful of air, with the pressure crushing my barrel suddenly relieved.
Gilda had opted to just remove the belly plate entirely, and held up what should have been a concave plate in front of her. “Okay, so this thing is screwed. Might make a decent shield, but bending it back into armor is a little beyond us out here right now.”
I took a deep breath, and relished the feeling of the bare leather armor underneath. After a moment, I smiled at her. “Th-thank you though. For gr-grabbing me, you s-saved—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Gilda waved off my gratitude. “Don’t mention it. Seriously, don’t. I don’t...eugh, it makes me feel weird when you ponies do that. I heard the howl, and figured it was worth taking a look. That’s all.”
She glanced around the roof to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind. My sword was still sheathed at my side; at least that hadn’t been damaged in the fall. After a moment, she shrugged. “Come on, Holly. Let’s get downstairs.”